Episode #304 – The Revelation Of God’s Glory

(M) This morning we had a meeting, just our regular meeting, and it seemed to turn into something very strategic, very powerful. And the only thing I had to begin to share was Isaiah 60: “Arise, shine, for your light has come and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you. For behold, darkness will cover the earth and deep darkness the peoples, but the Lord will arise upon you, and His glory will appear upon you. Nations will come to your light, and king’s to the brightness of your rising.” And I just went into that, that I felt that our calling, and I’m sure for the whole transcendent Church is to rise in this time, that darkness is creeping and increasing over the earth. In the end time… this is an end time’s passage, it’s not a millennium. It’s for now. And the call is to arise and shine, and that the glory of the Lord has risen upon you. I feel like what we’re moving toward in the Spirit is for God to be able to bring His glory, to manifest His glory. And I really feel that as the darkness increases, if you don’t rise in the glory, you will be suffocated by the darkness. You have to be in the glory, or the darkness will get you. The glory completely transcends, obliterates the darkness. The glory of the Lord is what He wants to pour into the Church, and so we started discussing that and listening to the Lord about it, and then Julie mentioned that she had been watching, Julie, you tell it. (Julie) Well, sometime ago we had kind of as a group been into the “Surviving The Cut” series that I believe the Disney channel did. (J) Discovery. (Julie) Discovery. Sorry. Disney! (They all laugh.) Please take that out. (J) It’s the Discovery channel. (Julie) Discovery channel did a couple of years ago. (They are all laughing and Martha says, “I think you should leave it in.”) (Julie) (Still laughing.) Miley Cyrus was in it, you know, it was cute, sorry. (M) Ok, back to, back to the… (J) Ok, the Discovery channel did, and it’s been a couple of years. (M) Hmhmm. (Julie) And I noticed the other day, some months ago, that they’d come out with a second season and down loaded it. So, sometime this weekend I had a little bit of down time and felt led to go back and watch that. And I watched two, a two part special episode on the Green Berets. And it just took me back to some of the military visions that we were having at that time. (M) Yeah, we really saw ourselves, off and on for years, we’ve seen ourselves as operating in a kind of military fashion. And we learned a lot on Austin Sparks’s book on prayer where he relates prayer in the church to military principles. So we gathered together, Julie and John and I, to watch it again and make note of those statements that the leaders say as they take these men through this unspeakable, grueling process of two weeks to find out who’s going to survive in combat. And ironically it doesn’t matter; your physical condition, or your physical size did not matter. And what Julie said was, “They were looking for the heart”. They were looking for, not a man’s preparation, but his heart. And they said in the beginning, before they came to the trial their mind was not in the right place; those who failed…their mind. And they said, “Your mind is your greatest enemy.” (J) Hmm, hmhmm. (M) But then they also said, “The right man in the right place devastates the enemy.” It’s a training, as I used to say, “I’m training people to be martyrs.” And the Green Berets are trained to operate on their own, in remote and hostile territory. They said it’s critical to know how a man acts alone, unsupervised and under great stress. So your life is the measure of your solitary life. (J) Hmhmm. (M) We’ve just been through that in the podcasts. Your life is only as strong as the strength of your private life. And we can’t boast of something out in public that we haven’t lived. I remember in the worship conference many years ago you had a statement that God gave you. (J) Oh, yeah, yeah it was, (John kind of laughs, Martha laughs) it was not received as well as I thought it should have been since it was given to me. But “If you don’t worship Me in private, I’ll humiliate you in your worship in public.” (M) Hmhmm. So that’s what they were… They both trained them to be a team and trained them to be alone. And so it’s quite inspiring. And I saw in it God’s process of chastening with us. A lot of what’s going, what’s happening in Christianity today in many circles is a hyper, grandiose experiences without the chastening and the cross that prepares you for the real thing. (J) I’d say it was without the true life of Christ. It just doesn’t bear the evidence of Christ’s own personal signature (Martha: “Ahhhh.”) and life. His personality, His, His being isn’t in it. Somehow it’s just ‘off’. (M) It doesn’t bear the image of the Lord. We watched something the other day that was quite shocking, and purported to be the Holy Spirit, but… I’m going to have Julie tell about her insight. But what struck me too was that the refusal to train, it’s not inability, but the refusal to train. (J) That was awesome. That was one of the key words too, absolutely. (M) But you saw something, Julie, about getting outside of yourself. (Julie) Yeah. What they’re referring to, there’s a part in the Green Beret assessment process, where they put them over this obstacle course that is specifically designed to freak these men out. And if they have, they say at the beginning if they have any hidden phobia’s, or any hidden, even any hidden selfishness or whatever, then this course is specifically designed to flush that out into the open. And before that they’ve even put them to where they’re physically tired and they say even the coping mechanisms they might have had before have probably broken down under stress. So they want to just really get down to what is the core vision of a man. And uhmm, in one of the scenes they show, a guy kind of freaks out on a thing involving heights, and the commanding officer is down on the ground telling him, “Stand up, stand up and do it.” And he just can’t get out of himself enough, and get out of his fear enough to do it. And so he comes down, and his only option is to voluntarily withdraw. And they call it not inability, at that point it’s not that he failed on ability, it’s that what goes down on his record is refusal to train. (J) Refusal. (Julie) Yes, refusal to train. (J) When I saw, you know, they basically made some statements, and from what they said I saw that crisis only reveals the choice that has already been made, and that when you fail in the crisis, what is revealed is your choice of ‘no’, already in place before the crisis arrived. (Julie) And, and that was one of the things I’d seen before when we were in this, is that I saw as critical, and I see it even more now. It has so much to do with whether or not you will give yourself to a vision that’s outside yourself, and the authority of a vision outside yourself, because that vision, at least for me, had to come from someone else. It came from outside of me. And it, there’s such a power in that, and I can see that that’s so much of what, that’s so much of how the Lord deals with us. He sets before us a vision that is bigger than us, impossible to us, but it’s not, it’s not an issue of our ability, it’s simply an issue of our willingness to submit to train. (J) Hmhmm, hmhmm. (M) Well, you know the famous verse is, “Without a vision My people perish.” And the Amplified translation is “Without a vision My people throw off all restraint.” See its vision. And I think… We were talking this morning, what do we want for this coming conference, and in this last series, of what, five conferences? My hope has been to create a vision of something beyond the troubles of this earth, beyond everything. And to… What I think… Julie said to me one day, “You’re training officer’s, not footman.” And if that’s so, I’m training leaders. And we saw this morning in our meeting, that we are a group of leaders. That doesn’t mean independent, because in this film they said this statement, the teams… They give these awful tasks to four teams, and oh, I mean it took ingenuity, it took imagination, it took strength and determination. And they had an obstacle course laid out, and they had a time limit. They said that the teams that perform well are the teams that support their leader. That’s the same thing we learned from T. Austin Sparks in his concept of a prayer group. And that a team that fights ‘within’, each other, will just get smashed, they say. It’ll just break down, and one team did. But ah… And that everybody suffers from one person who is weak. There was one person who sloughed off in this obstacle course, and they made the entire team stand alert for three hours on their feet, after exhaustion. So they had to learn that if one was weak, everybody paid. There’s so many lessons for the Body of Christ in this thing. So, but I think what I’m trying to, what my heart is, not what I’m trying, that’s the wrong word. What I feel the Lord has given to me as a motivation and zeal is to create a vision. If you don’t have a vision for the next life, you won’t die for the Lord in this life. So, if you want it in this life, you will not be a team member, and you will not be in the place where God will establish… I think what God wants to do is establish the presence of His glory in the face of this darkness. The glory should so overshadow, over-rule, and obliterate the darkness. And I think if we could have an overview of it we would see how fast the darkness is increasing. And it says in one translation, “intense darkness over the people.” And… (J) Jen read that one in Holman, it was absolute or complete, total, (Martha: “total”) total, that was it, total darkness. (M) Oh wow, in the Holman translation. So we just, we just see, we just were very sober this morning, but very hopeful that the Lord will prepare us to, not just our group but the whole conference, prepare us for the glory of God. (J) Well, the fact is that if you don’t have that choice made, and the glory, the darkness that comes in the end times, the darkness that we see coming, the darkness that is making itself evident, it’s impossible. We will not make it bar a supernatural impartation of glory and grace. There’s, there’s no way, absolutely no way that we’ll make it. We as American’s are very pampered. And to have us be annihilated, leveled, whatever, our comforts, our protections that we think we’re protected, you know, and all these securities and pillows around our being, you know, that has been God’s blessing upon us. When those are removed, the sheer weight of not having that support, it will be impossible; it will be impossible. (M) But we’re in training even in the midst of our conference, if we will spot it and if we’re willing to be trained. It goes back to that phrase again, the unwillingness to be in training. I saw so much the ways of the cross in this film, because the cross comes to break down what in you what will defeat you. And if we resist the cross, which we’re free to do, if we will not have the cross, the cross is big ‘IF’, then we will not be ready. And we will actually be the betrayers of Christ. So, it is so sober to me this morning, so serious. And, but I’m also excited. I’m more excited after this sober meeting, really, than I have been at all, because it is going to be a time when believers… I feel like sort of it’s our family will come together from all over the place, and I think it’s going to be a very special visitation of God. And we’re being trained in preparation for it.

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